Melanoma

When you come to Winship Cancer Institute for melanoma treatment, you have a multidisciplinary team of experts dedicated to your well-being.

Your Care at Winship

The Melanoma Clinic at Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University offers patients a comprehensive and multidisciplinary approach to treatment.

Your Winship care team draws on Emory’s vast resources in dermatology, surgical oncology, and medical oncology to provide the newest, most effective practices and treatments for melanoma. Our Melanoma Program is a coordinated, cohesive program with a dedicated treatment plan established for each patient.

As specialists, our teams develop groundbreaking surgeries and treatments that produce better outcomes and are adopted by other leading cancer centers. Our melanoma team treats patients with squamous cell carcinoma, basal cell carcinoma, merkel cell carcinoma and even rarer forms of melanoma, such as, mucosal melanoma and ocular melanoma.

The benefits of our multidisciplinary and highly experienced teams include:

Access to doctors and surgeons who rank among the top cancer experts in the world.

Learn About Cancer

Your Treatment Options

Treatment options for melanoma will depend on a number of factors including the patient’s overall health, the thickness of the tumor and whether the disease has spread.

Surgery is the first line of treatment if melanoma has not spread throughout the body. For some patients, removing the tumor will offer a cure. Patients with advanced disease may require additional surgery, radiation therapy or immunotherapy following surgery.

Immunotherapy is a type of biological therapy delivered through medication that stimulates or suppresses the immune system to fight cancer.

Certain skin cancers of the lower extremities may require removal of the local lymph nodes. Here at Winship, our doctors have pioneered a groin dissection technique for the removal of lymph nodes that improves recovery and lowers the risk of infection.

Targeted therapies: Winship’s most promising research in treating melanoma is in personalized medicine and targeted therapies. In personalized medicine, researchers identify unique characteristics of tumors that make them vulnerable to known drugs so therapy can be tailored to an individual’s cancer. In targeted therapies, investigators look for new drugs that more selectively target cancer cells with fewer side effects.

Chemotherapy may be used to treat advanced melanoma. It is not often used during initial treatment because of the availability of immunotherapy and targeted therapy.

Douglas C. Parker MD

Board certified in anatomic pathology and in dermatopathology, Dr. Parker is involved in the histopathologic interpretation and diagnosis of skin lesions for patients at both Emory University Hospital and Grady Memorial Hospital.

Associate Professor, Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, Emory University School of Medicine